


Buried in Water

by jujubiest



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: F/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 06:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake is not coping. He still has so many questions, and with no way to get answers, his uncertainty and the horror of nearly drowning sink inward. Going to the river is the only thing that helps. It's the only time he feels as though someone is watching over him, instead of just watching him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buried in Water

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Grimm 3x04: One Night Stand.

He keeps coming back to the river. He doesn’t know why he bothers; Elly and her family left weeks ago, right after the whole horrible incident that started as a fun day by the water and ended with his best friend dead, his own head nearly bashed in, and about a million questions he never had before hanging in the air, unanswered.

Jake knows there was something different about her. A mutation, magic…he doesn’t know _what_ to call it and he can’t exactly go looking for answers. He wouldn’t know where to start, and typing “do mermaids exist” into Google genuinely freaked him out so much he almost had a panic attack. He’s starting to think he’s losing it. Could he have imagined the whole thing? Could it be post-traumatic stress from nearly drowning and then finding out his best friend had been murdered? That would certainly make it easier to deal with, except…

Elly wanted to show him something that night, something about _her_ , something to do with the water. He remembers it like a video playing over and over in his head. Her eyes were like mirrors. She had _gills,_ for crying out loud. He couldn’t have imagined that. Except…how does a teenage girl have gills?

It took him all of two days after he picked the guy who attacked him—probably one of the guys who killed Dan, and Jesus, he doesn’t want to think about that—out of a lineup. Two days of trying to tell himself it was a trick of the light. Two days of arguing that if it was all his imagination, why didn’t the cops just _tell_ him he was being ridiculous? Why did they believe him? He was never a suspect, even though he openly admitted to being the last person to see Dan alive. His story was ridiculous; something in the river grabbed him and dragged him under, and then he was saved by a mysterious girl who then disappeared, while his friend disappeared only to turn up later, dead. It sounded suspicious even to him, so why did they just _believe_ him without question?

And why, when he told Detective Burkhardt he thought Elly was a mermaid— _a mermaid,_ for fuck’s sake—did the man look at him and give him some grave, cryptic bullshit about no one in Portland being normal? It almost sounded like a warning.

When he realized he was actually _arguing with his own head,_ he decided to pay Elly a visit. He didn’t figure her father or sisters would be that happy to see him, all things considered, but he needed to see her. He felt like he was losing his mind. He needed answers. And, if he were being totally honest with himself, he kind of _really_ wanted to see her again. He wanted to thank her for saving his life. And he wanted to make sure she was okay. Detective Burkhardt had reassured him that she was fine, but Jake wanted to see it for himself.

Only when he got to their house, it was obviously empty. The windows were dark and there was a For Sale sign in the front yard. Elly was gone.

Then he really _did_ start cracking up.

At first it was only nightmares. He would wake up thrashing in his sheets, gasping for air and soaked in sweat, certain he was drowning. He started falling behind in his classes, nodding off in the middle of lectures or forgetting to go to them all together. All of that sucked, and Jake was more than a little worried about how he was going to pull a halfway decent GPA out of this semester. But he could deal with it, for the most part. A lot of his professors were willing to go the extra mile to forgive him, considering.

But then he started seeing things. Flashes of the corner of his eye mostly, someone’s face would look…not quite right. But when he’d blink and look again, everything was fine. Then, too, he started seeing Elly _everywhere._ A girl with dark, wavy hair. Someone who moved like her. Once, he almost swore he saw someone with eyes that flashed like mirrored lenses, the way hers had…the way he _thought_ hers had, that night in the pool.

He feels jumpy all the time, like something is just waiting to grab him and drag him back under. He’s afraid of being in water, even the shower. It takes him ten minutes every night just to make himself step under the spray. Rainy days have become sick days as far as he’s concerned, which, considering he lives in the Pacific North- _fucking-_ west, is becoming a problem. It’s as though his mind wants to reject everything his eyes have seen, and recoils from even the smallest of reminders.

Jake started going to the river every afternoon when his classes were finished, about the time he discovered he could no longer stand to feel water on his skin without a ten minute pep talk before and a half an hour to calm his racing heartbeat after. He can’t go in, can’t even dip his toes…but he can sit on the banks and look at the water. He can listen to the quiet eddying whir of the water moving past him, the wind in the tall grass. It’s, strangely, the only place he ever feels calm anymore. He feels watched over here, instead of just watched; as though someone waits just out of sight, making sure nothing bad will happen to him. He sits on the sandy bank and breathes deeply. He thinks about Elly, wonders what she’s doing, where she is. Sometimes he brings homework.

One day, a couple of months after he first started coming to the river, Jake falls asleep. The weather is unseasonably warm and typically balmy, the sun behind a cloud, his head pillowed on the jacket he doesn’t need. The book he’d brought for his Intro to Lit class lays open on his chest, forgotten. It’s too nice a day to keep reading, and the sound of the river flows over his thoughts, smoothing them out into a soothing blank. His eyes drift closed.

_Jake stepped forward, cautious but intrigued. This girl had risked her own life to save his, jumped into a river infested with God-only-knew-what and pulled him out. She’d saved him. He felt a small ripple of awe; it was an emotion with which he was barely familiar, something talked about in church when he was a kid that he always figured was more dramatic interpretation than anything, like speaking in tongues._

_He couldn’t have said why, but he trusted her. When she took his hand and tugged, he followed easily, through the kitchen of his tiny apartment and out the door, down the hall and through the door that led to the courtyard, and the pool._

_The courtyard door opened onto a familiar bank, tall, yellowing grasses that gave way to pale sand, which in its turn gave way to murky river water. Jake froze, the toes of his shoes just barely peeking out of the grass line. Elly released his hand and continued forward, back toward him. He opened his mouth to call out to her, only to find that his voice had deserted him. He couldn’t make a sound, and he couldn’t run forward to stop her._

_Jake knew that if she went into the water something horrible would happen to her, and Jake couldn’t let that happen. He_ needed _to move. He needed to stop her from going into the water. If only she would turn around, before…_

Jake opens his eyes, blinking up at the bright, concrete-colored blanket of clouds overhead. He sits up and looks around, shivering. The day has turned cold, and a wind is starting to pick up, rippling across the water and turning the tall grass into yellow-green waves. It reminds Jake of the ocean, and the thought of walking through it to get to his car makes him feel slightly sick. But then he hears the muted growl of coming thunder, and the thought of being caught in the rain makes him so panicked that he’s packed up with his jacket on, through the grass and back in his car before he really even knows what he’s doing. He blinks at the steering wheel in front of him, disoriented, and then looks out at the wall of grass blocking his view of the river.

That watched-over feeling hasn’t disappeared yet. He usually feels it only within sight of the water, but this time it stays with him. It stays as he cranks the car, backs out of the parking space, and even as he’s driving away. The calm doesn’t entirely lift until the riverbanks are well out of his line of sight in the rearview mirror. Even then, it takes almost the entire drive home for the white noise of panic to which Jake has grown so accustomed to regain its former volume in his mind.

Jake parks his car, a little crookedly, in his usual spot. He jerks violently at a distant rumble of thunder overhead, and grabs his book from the passenger seat before careening out of the car and across the short distance to his apartment as fast as his legs can carry him. He fumbles with the lock for a horrible moment before pulling the door open and falling inside. He locks himself in and collapses against the blessed barrier between him and the rain, taking large, painful, desperate gulps of air. When the thunder sounds again outside, it only causes a small tremor to shudder across his frame.

It takes a few minutes for Jake to pull himself together enough to get to his feet and remove his jacket, and when he does he sees something that almost sends him to the floor again.

There, dangling from the shoulder of his jacket, barely clinging to the fibers, is a long, black, wavy strand of hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure if I will do more of this. I was really intrigued by these characters but I don't know what else their story could entail.


End file.
